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Thursday, June 17, 2010

creation... repulsive

Bonaventure's second step in our journey to God was to judge those vestiges of nature, which we call animals.

When I posted on facebook that I had found a tick on me a few weeks back, a friend asked if ticks have any redeeming value.

When I see a tick on me, I am not joyous. When a bear stopped me one day while I was bicycling as a young man... I knew enough to avoid a close encounter.

I once read a book on places in the world where humans are not on the top of the food chain... places with tigers, brown bear, and a couple other critters. Not many such places left, which though I find sad, just doesn't shock me that humans have killed those that kill us.

So I feel we should be repulsed by the sight of certain animals, but are they are redeeming...

In the game of rock, paper, scissors; if you remove one item, you remove another because it will always lose. Nature is like that, remove one, and another will lose out.

It doesn't mean I will allow a tick to feed on me so that the bacteria that causes Lymes disease will not go extinct. But there was a day when ticks and tigers kept our population from growing exponentially and some may say that was a good thing. I just may agree with them, but be glad I can walk the streets without fear of being eaten.

Today two very young deer were dancing about in my vegetable garden at work. Were they cute, most definitely. However, so far this spring my lettuce, radishes, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans... all have been devastated by ground hogs and deer. It has never been so bad and what worked in the past is failing to protect the crops now.

and so I am ready to say, "you win," and quit trying to win the battle. I guess it is better than being eaten by a grizzly. and I do dig onions, garlic and herbs which the varmints do not like. Who knows, maybe I can use all my left over vegetable seeds to feed those dancing deer?

My brother-in-law, who is 80-something and raises a huge garden every year, is losing his at the moment to all the torrential rain we've had in this area, but told me the other day that "ground squirrels" (which he enlightened me as to being chipmunks) are the biggest threats to his plants. I don't have a garden, per se, but am trying again this year to save some seeds from the lone dwarf sunflower that looks to be doing well and noticed just the other day that "Alvin" is living just outside my garage door somewhere. As long as he leaes the flower alone, we shall remain friends....

Every year I've had a garden, and every year the fence was good enough, until last year. Ground hogs decimated my broccoli and kale and took selective bites out of every tomato they could reach... until the blight killed them all (tomatoes that is... not the varmints).

I'm adding 3 feet to the top, designed to flop back on top of the groundhog when it tries to climb.